Participatory Visual Education
Over the past weeks I have had a number of conversations with Yang Kun, a visiting research fellow at the Research School of the Humanities at the Australian National University, from Yunan in China. He has been involved with Yunfest, an independant documentary film festival in China, as well as in Participatory Visual Education or PVE projects in Yunan.
Since 2005 Yunfest has had a “Participatory Visual Education” category for entries from participatory film making projects, providing a great platform for works made in this collaborative way to get a wider audience and for makers to network with each other.
There are 6 films of the first DVD released from stage one of the PVE project, some as long as 30 minutes, others only a few minutes long. The 2nd stage of the project involved the creation of a small book – with photos, drawings and stories from people in the participating communities about traditional crafts and stories. The third stage will be released at this years YunFest, held in Yunnan in March 2009. These are films made in partnership between community members and a researcher, and, if the stage one films are anything to go by, they will be very interesting.
Check out the YunFest site http://www.yunfest.org/ for lots of info on films and the overall yunfest project.